Fights on rise at Manteca, raising concerns for safety
By PEYTON WALTER
The Tower
At Manteca High School, seven different students have been expelled for fighting since the start of the school year. The recent spike in fights has caused many different students to have safety concerns.
“I’m scared that I might get jumped while I’m at school,” Manteca High sophomore, Blake Glasgow said. “I don’t think the admin at our school are aware enough of what’s happening with students off and on campus.”
Oh, but they are.
Administration at Manteca High is implementing programs that are designed to discourage students from fighting and instead ask them to work on ways to talk out their problems. These programs, like Honor the Code, are still a work in progress, though, so they will take some time to be completely established.
Honor the Code is a program at Manteca High that reinforces positive behavior and campus etiquette. The objective of the program is to get students to be more involved in school activities with good role models so they can steer away from bad behavior.
Manteca High principal Megan Peterson works on her computer in her office on Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023. Peterson believes a program like Honor the Code will help curb the recent spike in fights on campus. (Caleb Reynolds)
Manteca High principal Megan Peterson said: “We’re trying to expand the Honor the Code to start really incentivizing positive behaviors instead of just punishing bad behavior, but we’ve just started that. So that’s a two- to three-year process, but the more we can get kids engaged in school whether its clubs, sports, enjoying their classes that seems to lessen the number of fights as well and that unfortunately sometimes just means eliminating some of the kids from campus and that usually calms things down.”
Counselor Wayne Cheung said that fighting can have many different effects on those involved. Students can be affected emotionally, mentally, and academically besides the actual physical harm they can endure from fighting.
“If you do get in a fight, you’ll get suspended. Usually, it’s for five days which will make you miss school and you’re going to fall behind in all your classes. That affects you academically, because you have to make up all your work, tests, and everything like that,” Cheung said. “When it comes to the emotional part, I feel like in high school they always talk about what happened. So even though it happened two weeks ago students will talk about that fight and feel like in the back of your mind people will be talking about you, which will cause a lot of stress. The mental part of it is that it might stick with you for a long time, so even when you’re trying to get away from the fight you do have that reputation and it just doesn’t feel good for a student.”
A lot of fights with students usually start off campus or on social media and then the actual physical altercations of the fight happen on campus. Fighting never actually solves the problems at hand though and students just end up getting hurt and in trouble.
“Lots of things usually build up to students fighting and they don’t use their words because they don’t have that skill set,” Peterson said. “Lots of teenagers, a lot of people, get hotheaded and you must have that skill set where you’re willing to sit down and have that conversation. Ninety-nine percent of kids do that, but there are some kids that struggle with that.”